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Thursday, December 30, 2010

It was a couple months ago that I came up with the idea to do a little bento series for the Twelve Days of Christmas, so I've had awhile to brainstorm specific ideas for each one. A couple ideas were immediate - a partridge in a pear tree? Easy peasy. Two turtle doves? A no brainer! But there were a couple that have been tricky for me, and six geese a laying was one of them.

At one point I asked Ethan if he had any ideas for the goose bento. Boy did he! He drew a diagram to illustrate his goose vision:

I was very impressed! He's always been very creative and I loved his take on sculpting geese. I really considered following his blue print, thinking I could put the geese in a muffin pan, one goose for each muffin cup space - their nests where they are a-laying! I even had just bought some organic kiwis, which are conveniently packaged six to a bag! It looked like all the stars were aligning... until further prodding in the pantry revealed that the only "chocolate covered pretzels" (he meant pocky sticks!) were the fat almond crusted ones...and our only marshmallows we had were the big fat ones... and then found that one of the kiwis had been eaten by Paige and another one squashed and mauled by Tyler. Boo.

Emergency plan B. Make a goose shaped cookie cutter. I remembered an old post on my friend Wendy's blog, where she writes about how she fashioned a batman cutter for her son Wyatt.

So I dug out the mini duck-shaped cutter that I had bought for 50 cents at a local hobby store for the ChemoDuck bentos.

Gathered some tools. I needed needle nose pliers, a thin Lego, a K'nex stick and a drumstick (don't mind the grime).

The end product looked something like this:
(well, okay, it looked exactly like this):

And the resulting six geese a laying bento:

In the top tier tray of an ultra awesome stainless tiffin box is a snack of Ritz crackers, custom-made goose-shaped cheese, a blue silicone cup "nest" full of mint M&M "eggs".

The geese are cut out of provolone cheese and decorated with food-safe markers. The little feet are cut using an itty bitty bento cutter and fruit leather. Both my husband and Ethan were baffled as to why some geese had two feet and others had one. Simply, some of the geese are laying in such a way their 2nd foot is obscured from view, of course. ;-) (really, I thought it looked a little crowded when they all had two feet showing so I took a few out).

The bottom of this tiffin box held leftover pizza and apple wedges and was not a pretty sight, so I'll spare you the photo. ;-) I'll be sharing more about this neato tiffin box soon!

You're a food genius! I'm looking forward to whatever happens on the 7th day. I'm expecting the twelfth to be a feat seeing as how 12 is a lot of something (I don't remember off hand what surprises happen on the twelfth day of Christmas).